Colloquium: Tuesday, December 6, 2 pm. Speaker: Tali Pinsky (Tata institute – India). Title: “Could the Lorenz flow be hyperbolic?”.

I will describe the theory of hyperbolic dynamical systems, and then describe a new approach to chaotic flows in dimension three, using knot theory. I’ll use this to show that, surprisingly, the famous Lorenz flow on R^3 can be related to the geodesic flow on the modular surface. When changing the parameters, we also find a new type of topological phases in the Lorenz system.

This will be an introductory talk.